1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to website monitoring and more specifically related to selectively sharing data obtained from performing such monitoring.
2. Related Art
In the current state of the art of web performance monitoring, parties interested in monitoring a particular website, web application, web service, web API, or in general monitoring a target, setup an account with a provider of such monitoring services in order to obtain the desired data. Owners of these accounts monitor one or more targets through the service provider regardless of whether another account owner is already monitoring the same target. This results in significant redundant monitoring and generates data with various degrees of accuracy for the same target, giving rise to the problem of which set of data is truly accurate and valid.
Currently, there are two different well-known ways to share web performance monitoring data. One possibility is to give another interested party access to an owner's monitoring account by providing the interested party with certain login information such as a user name and password (“credentials”) for the owner's account. Another possibility is to give the interested party one or more reports of the collected monitoring data.
In the former case, a high degree of trust must be present between the parties sharing the data, since the recipient of the credentials will have full access to the owner's accounts. The high degree of trust requirement makes this method unsuitable for most situations.
In the latter case, reports are limited in the sense that they lack the analysis tools usually provided with monitoring accounts. Moreover, creating an integrated report one party's monitoring data combined with the other party's monitoring data becomes tedious, as two different data sources need to be reconciled in order for both sets of data to be viewed, examined, and correlated into one or more reports.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method that overcomes these significant problems found in the conventional systems as described above.